Robert Horton, Writing About Film

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About This Site

The Crop Duster has two goals. One is to organize links to my critical work: reviews written for The Herald (Everett, Washington) and Seattle Weekly; and public appearances and TV jobs. Selected past work for Film Comment and elsewhere is also linkified. You may also link to my website of 1980s reviews and learn more about my book on Frankenstein and my graphic novel, ROTTEN.

The second goal is to keep a daily record of films watched, annotated with brisk, brief comments. It's a slightly more advanced version of the movie list I kept, in Flair pen, thumbtacked next to my bed when I was twelve.

Pages

A Tale of Five Cities (Montgomery Tully et al., 1951). A stilted postwar project about a British RAF pilot (Bonar Colleano) with amnesia, who travels to five places in order to locate women he met, in the hope they can identify him (he’s got their autographs but no I.D. of his own). The premise is actually workable; it’s the execution that constantly relies on contrived bad-sitcom-level misunderstandings. The cities are Rome, Vienna, Berlin, Paris, and London, all with some pretty interesting location shooting (the movie apparently has uncredited directors for the different sections; for instance, Wolfgang Staude, who did the harrowing “rubble film” The Murderers Are Among Us, shot the Berlin segment, using some of the same ruined streets). There’s one affecting section, in Vienna, with Eva Bartok as a Hungarian immigrant who can’t leave the country and exists as a paid escort. (Thanks to going down the IMDb rabbit hole, I now know all about Eva Bartok, including her claim that the daughter she bore while married to Curt Jurgens was actually the child of Frank Sinatra.) There’s some fun with Gina Lollobrigida in the Roman segment, whose boyfriend is played by an extremely young Marcello Mastroianni. Otherwise – a weird one.